Reviews : Aqris RefactorIT 1.3.2 :

Review: Aqris RefactorIT 1.3.2

by: Drew Falkman

Introduction

Anyone who has ever worked with a large codebase, one with hundreds of classes, knows that refactoring is an important step in any development cycle. For the unitiated, refactoring is the process of cleaning up code to remove unneeded items, eliminate redundancies and an overall streamlining all of the objects, classes and packages within a development environment. It can include anything from renaming methods and objects to breaking up a single method into multiple more scalable methods and other similar tasks, essentially anything that will make the code tighter, more readable and easier to modify for future programmers. Many of the refactoring tools currently available are standalone applications and are geared towards software developers who include refactoring as a crucial step in their overall software development life cycles. However, in the corporate environment where there are often numerous developers (both in-house and outsourced) working on numerous modules across the enterprise, this step is often overlooked or put off until it is a gigantic task. Quite often it is forced because a giant spaghetti-code mass has led to errors and performance issues.

This is the need Aqris is attempting to address with RefactorIT. RefactorIT works as a standalone application or integrates with numerous Integrated Development Environments (IDEs): Sun ONE Studio 4 (Forte), NetBeans, Borland JBuilder (version 5 and up) and Oracle 9i JDeveloper. RefactorIT is a solid refactoring tool for corporate environments that develop in Java. Let's take a look.

What You Can Do With RefactorIT

RefactorIT has four different usages:

Automatic Refactorings: These are items that can be redone throughout your codebase quickly and easily. Such items including moving methods/classes, renaming objects and cleaning up import statements. Changing items will also change all of the instances that the changed object (or whatever you are changing) are called on. One change often effects numerous classes.
Code Searching and Analyzing: RefactorIT can also search through your codebase to find specific items that you specify. This can include comparing two API versions, finding duplicate strings and finding where a specific exception is handled.
Auditing: Audits of your codebase will warn of potential hazards and messiness such as unused variables and imports, empty blocks and self assignments.
Metrics Measuring: RefactorIT can also measure a number of key metrics in your code, items you can analyze and interpret however you like, including lines of code, density of comments and number of types.

Note: a more comprehensive list of what RefactorIT does can be found in a PDF factsheet at their Web site.

If you are new to the concept of refactoring, you are probably wondering just how you have gotten by without it up until now. I to am wondering how you got by without it as well, quite frankly. The power of a tool like this to enable you to move a method from one class in one package to another class in another package and update all of the code where that method is called on, is a marvel. Add in the ability to analyze, audit and measure code and you have a really powerful tool that can save developers hundreds of hours in the long run and minimalize poor coding practices that may have otherwise slipped through the cracks.

That all said, some of these tools are available from within most IDEs already. It is noticeable that RefactorIT is not available in versions for BEA Systems' WebLogic Studio, IBM WebSphere Studio (and thus Eclipse) or IDEA IntelliJ. This is likely because these IDEs all have at least some of the major refactoring tools built in (with the exception of Eclipse, which is not really an enterprise-level tool per se, more on this later... Even the supported IDEs do support some of these analytic and refactoring tools, but none have all of these capabilities, and these capabilities allow companies to elevate the level of code they are creating.

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